When Tech Firms Control Thought

After the violence in Charlottesville, Va., some tech firms and social-media sites were quick to ban white supremacists — far quicker than they were when it came to scrubbing radical Islamic terrorists.

GoDaddy, Google and even Russian Internet officials booted the Daily Stormer, a neo-Nazi and white-supremacist Web site, after it published a despicable derogatory story about the woman killed by a white supremacist in Charlottesville.

Facebook took hits for failing to remove the event page for the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville. Even OkCupid, a dating site owned by Match.com, banned white supremacist Chris Cantwell for life for joining that rally.

“There’s no room for hate in a place where you’re looking for love,” tweeted the folks at OkCupid.

Yet the tech companies haven’t treated all “objectionable” sites equally. Even after the shooting attack that nearly killed House GOP Majority Whip Steven Scalise, or the violent rallies against conservative speakers, little if anything was done to shut down online violence-spouting left-wing extremists, such as the antifa thugs.

Which raises a key question: Can these mammoth custodians of information and public debate be trusted to fairly decide what’s objectionable?

True, as private entities, these firms may be within their legal rights to decide whom they’ll do business with, who gets to use their sites and how.

But given their near-monopoly status and enormous power to control thought and debate, that ought to make everyone nervous.